Presta, Ida Giulia. "Spazi per abitanti temporanei. Nuove forme dell'abitare contemporaneo". Doctoral thesis, 2022. http://hdl.handle.net/11589/237218.
Resumen
The main idea of the research was based on the observation of the phenomena that have affected society and the contemporary city, specifically the distinctive elements of today's urban communities such as the great mobility, the consequent temporary nature of living that is often associated with the need for forms of shared residence. The context of these reflections is a city that continually redefines the geography of its borders, expanding in its semantic, digital, economic and social dimensions. It can be said that a space has opened up for all those who live "between" (Martinotti 1993) these large urban agglomerations/conurbations (Balducci 2011).
In Western societies, territories and cities are crossed by flows of people who move for work needs, training in the new conditions determined by the profound mutation of production processes due to the advent of the Knowledge Economy (S. Bologna, D. Banfi 2011; S. Bologna 2015) or tourists and city users moved by new cultural and loisir interests (M. R. McWaffers 2008; M. D'Eramo 2017; A. di Campli 2019).
But to these new figures are added the migrants who have been uprooted from their places of origin by the geopolitical and physical fragility of their countries, wars, repressions, effects of climate changes often make entire regions of these countries inhospitable. These epochal changes affect the structure of urban settlements and the organization of space in contemporary cities and especially in the forms of living that change the paradigms of traditional living put in crisis by housing models increasingly temporary and flexible. Temporary dwellers have managed to put in tension the fundamental relationship between man and space, from a physical, political and also symbolic point of view. The element that best defines these (new) inhabitants is the temporariness of being, the finding oneself in a non-defined condition, which often constitutes the drive that brings together insiders and outsiders of a city. This scenario of transformation, already in 2016 during the Architecture Biennale, curated by Alejandro Aravena, entitled "Reporting from the front," and later in the 2021 Biennale, curated by Hashim Sarkis, entitled "How we Will live together?" The theme of living becomes central to the international debate. The proposals of the culture of design produce settlement and housing solutions that challenge the status quo and propose new models of living space.
In the past, the place of birth defined in a fairly stable way the prospects of life of an individual, but today the place where we live and work can determine the relationships, opportunities, the same overall quality of life.
Particularly significant for the impact it generates on the quality and conception of the city is the phenomenon of those who migrate for cultural reasons, pursuing new opportunities for work and higher education. These new opportunities, although in precarious conditions, allow a self-determination in building a relationship with the places of residence.
This defines a new (but also ancient) figure of the nomad who inhabits a city for a certain time (an essential variable in this framework: periodic time, rhapsodic time) grafting his life in a certain place.
After all, the Western intellectual community is conditioned by this cosmopolitanism and nomadism, and just as in ancient times the wandering clerics were communities of intellectuals who went around the universities (Eco 1980), or intellectuals who went on the Grand Tour, so in the contemporary age the great potential of material and immaterial connection contributes to creating new opportunities for work but at the same time new criticalities in the conditions of living. Temporary inhabitants have definitively unhinged those biunivocal correspondences between resident and dwelling, so we look for new ones. If the classic commuter moved in predefined time slots, periodic and even monitorable, the temporary inhabitant instead has a mobility with random forms in time and space.
In the last decades, social sciences have been interested in this phenomenon of the temporary resident, analyzing it in an interdisciplinary way. In particular, in the field of design disciplines, such as architecture and urban planning, these profound social changes exemplified in the concept of temporary resident, lead to radically rethink the traditional residential models, with the need to respond to the demands and expectations of these new social figures, who demand living and working spaces that meet precise performances. A significant part of public life and leisure time has therefore gradually shifted inside the home. This condition has led to the birth of new forms of living, where the public part is often shared with other individuals.
The digitization of society and the spread of the means of communication have also, especially now in the post-pandemic phase, obliged entire communities to experiment with new forms of work. Populations that integrate places of work and daily life require new performative characteristics to the space and, on the other hand, they look for places that maximize the forms of sharing of living and working (Dogma 2019). The research therefore proposes to understand these urban phenomena by detaching itself from the paradigms of modern living, entering into an articulated network of processes that sometimes overlap.
We set ourselves the objective of observing how the temporary inhabitant fits into the contemporary urban, through articulated types of spaces, in socio-cultural contexts also very different. In recent years, some experiences have attempted to express a better spatial quality to reconcile the desire for individuality with conditions of shared space. The identified projects, assumed as paradigmatic of the contemporary condition, are supported by a wide literature and then carrying out a comparative work of these experiences between recurrence and discontinuity. The interest placed on the projects looks at the housing models according to some processes of analysis. The first level of observation concerned the morpho-typological condition of the settlements examined, considering the architectural forms as the first crucial strategy in defining relational devices.
Some research trajectories have been isolated, corresponding to as many interpretative addresses through the notion of "Type". Subsequently, three strategic actions have been identified as a push for new urban spaces and processes that take into account the phenomena of contemporaneity mentioned above. These models, declined at multiple scales, have become fundamental elements of the contemporary city, having spread considerably in recent years, become a new component of the urban territorial plot (Secchi 2013). The research, however, attempts to describe how they can play a fundamental role in the processes of development and regeneration in the new forms of post-metropolis (Soja 2000, Balducci 2011). The temporary inhabitants, live two moments, one private in the accommodation, and one of condition in hybrid spaces. We define these places as threshold spaces between social dynamics (Di Campli 2019). We find again this typology of space within the case studies, which assumes the role of a device of interaction, favoring the emergence of significant social units. In the midst of the research path, the crisis from Covi-19 hit the planet, questioning the practices we were used to, distancing and blocking us. The home became the absolute space. However, there have been several experiences where communities of people have decided to face the crisis together, establishing covid free "co-living". Sharing can be a contemporary theme, to address ideas where sociality is seen as an enemy. Contemporary Urbanism ultimately can look at these temporary inhabitants as a resource to promote new urban and social visions.